So recently I discovered that the maintainer of my previous blogging software (Hugo) had added agent prompts to his project's repo.

This was a massive red flag to me, as I strictly oppose the use of generative AI trained on stolen labour, both within corporate spaces and in the open-source community which is being stolen from by companies like Anthropic. However, asking the maintainer for clarification on whether he uses AI led to him banning me from his forum, removing my question, refusin...

As I continue to build this blog into a real "digital home" for myself, I have now added all photos from my old Flickr account to the blog.

All of them are present in the gallery! Please note that I have automatically migrated some image metadata like titles and description from Flickr, but many of the older photos only have descriptions or titles in German, and some do not have any text associated with them.

I might go over all of them and polish their metadata in the future, bu...

A collection of signs and ads I came across and found amusing and/or interesting during my stay in Japan.

Monday, December 29th - Transfer to Tokyo

Time to get back to Tokyo. I stayed in a different hotel near Shimbashi station this time. Since all my hotels were budget options, I wanted to hedge my bets in case one of them absolutely sucked, but all the places I stayed were pretty nice.

I had reserved a seat on the Shinkansen in advance, but woke up way too early. I was still able to change my reservation to an earlier train, but still had to wait an hour for a train that had a window seat on...

Monday December 22nd - Transfer to Osaka

With week 1 already over, I hopped onto the Hikari after an awful night of sleep. My original plan was to leave the train at Nagoya and visit the SCMaglev museum. However, this plan failed because storing my luggage near Nagoya station was simply impossible. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because the trains hadn't even been that full, but the coin lockers were filled to the brim.

So I just had a quick lunch near the station, then hopped onto...

I am in Japan! (At least I am while writing this part.)

I've wanted to go there since 2018, finally had the funds to go in early 2020, and then COVID struck. After that, various personal things got into the way, and only this summer did I finally decided to spend my christmas vacation this year there.

The itinerary was rather simple: one week in Tokyo, then one in Osaka, then another week in Tokyo. All direct flights from Munich to Japan go to Haneda, and I did not want to take a multi-hour ...

Now that I've decided to reactivate my blog, I might as well start sharing inconsequential life updates on it.

I recently started collecting typewriters - I didn't really mean to, it just kind of happened, and now I own, like, eight.

I don't care a lot about mint condition or anything like that, I want to actually experience what it was like to use them, and my favourite piece is also among the more scratched-up ones.

It's a GDR-built Groma Kolibri, rebadged as a Neckersmann Brillant (sic.)...

Boso View Express, or BVE for short, is one of those train simulators that have been around for a very long time but never quite managed to establish themselves at the top of the food chain, at least not here in the west. But if you want to simulate Japanese railways, BVE is essentially the holy grail.

You can find a huge variety of routes and vehicles, all of them with appropriate train protection and signalling systems courtesy of a highly-flexible plugin interface, for absolutely no money a...

Just giving a quick shout-out to this Tumblr, which combines a thing I like with a thing I like: Trains In Games

A collection of photos from a trip to Venice